RECOVERING FROM THE PLAGUE
July 7th, 2008 adminI called in a medic because my garden was deathly ill. New leaves that should have been dark green came out jaundiced yellow. Pea vines were turning into brown tissue paper. Something attacked my roses, drilling black holes into the buds and leaving behind a sticky film. Elsewhere, I saw signs of powdery mildew, soil-born fungus and generalized blight-but then again, I wasn’t sure which was which. Meanwhile, some critter dug out the bean seeds I’d just planted, leaving big, accusatory holes in the soil. Bermuda grass, that worst of all weeds, massed on the borders, poised to impose anarchy.
Long ago, I thought gardens took care of themselves and that gardening was a meditative act precisely because I didn’t have to be good at it. I threw seeds in the ground, pottered around for a few weeks and wham-cucumbers appeared among the weeds, and wasn’t that a raspberry I saw through the underbrush?
No more. Now my too-few gardening hours were devoted to damage control measures that didn’t control damage. I showed diseased leaves to local nurseries and bought the organic remedies they recommended, spraying on sulphur, iron, nitrogen and a host of supporting minerals. Molasses, Neem oil, garlic juice, cayenne pepper, baking soda? I tried them all, in various combinations, but the garden plague marched on.
The gurus in my favorite garden books didn’t seem to understand that time was running out. Howard Garrett advised me to “work on improving the soil,” which was sort of like telling a person with emphysema to spend a few months thinking about quitting smoking. He seemed to think the plague was just a phase, and that my garden would grow out of it.
A terrible parenting metaphor came into my head. My garden, once an innocent toddler full of potential, was now a juvenile delinquent who had already been in trouble with the law and was definitely hanging with the wrong crowd. Too frazzled to spend quality time with this wayward kid, I compensated by trying to run its life on weekends. We needed a therapist, or maybe one of those medical teams that flies around on a helicopter.
So I decided to find a garden coach, which, as far as I could tell, was a relatively new type of consultant-not as design-y as a landscape architect nor as scientific as an extension agent, but somehow qualified, reasonably priced and chummy. I imagined paying this person to visit my garden for an hour, pat my back as I whimpered, and tell me exactly what to do. Maybe I’d have to replace every inch of soil after disposing of “diseased plant tissue” in a bomb-proof receptacle. Perhaps she’d recommend a rigorous weekly spraying program I’d barely have time to do. But at least I’d be working with a professional prescription.
Several garden coaches have sprung up in Austin in the past year. The first one I contacted wasn’t a vegetable expert, but she agreed to put the word out. Within an hour, I’d received emails from three strangers, each recommending I try to get an audience with Patty Leander, who isn’t a garden coach seeing private clients, but a certified Master Gardener known for giving detailed PowerPoint presentations filled with high-quality photographs of plants, both healthy and non-. She was, they said, the Central Texas vegetable authority. She stayed busy lecturing, writing for the Texas Gardener and tending her own thirty-by-fifty square foot garden, where she occasionally runs vegetable trials.
I never expected her to contact me.
“I am not applying for the job of garden medic,” she wrote, “but I would be very interested in visiting you in your garden just to see what’s going on. I regularly give classes on vegetable gardening in and around Austin, and I think it would be helpful for me to see what your problems are, because chances are other folks are having the same issues.”
Fat chance, I thought. Three days later, Patty stood at my front door bearing fresh zucchini, eggplant, cucumbers and one perfect gardenia. Barely stopping to chat, she strode back to the garden and began poking around, sometimes whipping out a magnifying glass, sometimes moving around on her knees. I waited for the bad news.
“Your tomatoes look good,” she said. “You’ve got some big ones ripening in there.”
“The leaves are covered with yellow spots,” I said in disbelief. “They’re dying from the ground up! I can’t stop the trauma!” Now that she mentioned it, though, I did notice a dozen rather large tomatoes.
”Well, you do have spider mites,” she said, shrugging. “I get them too, once in a while.”
“So what do I do? I tried the insecticidal soap and-”
“Spray the underside of the leaves with a stream of water. Knocks off the mites. Try to do it first thing in the morning.”
All told, Patty spent about an hour in my garden identifying funguses, bugs known as “sharp shooters”, plenty more spider mites, and a whole bed of strawberries that looked awful, but were simply past their prime. “Dig ‘em up and plant some okra,” she suggested. Nothing she saw intimidated her. In fact, she said, ladybugs were already mounting a counter attack, and a giant bronze fennel seemed to be emitting positive vibes.
“Your letter made this sound a lot worse than it looks,” she said.
For the next two weeks followed her advice. I:
- spent time in the garden every morning, looking around. I noticing the comings and goings of bugs, blooms and blight.
- cut off unhealthy-looking plant parts, threw them away and then cleaned the clippers with a bleach solution.
- Washed the undersides of mite-stricken plants with a sharp stream of water every few days.
- Squashed bugs I knew were bad but left the mysterious ones alone.
I noticed improvement almost immediately, not so much because problems were eradicated, but because they were roped in. I began harvesting tomatoes, pole beans, basil and peppers. Every day I tied up a straggly stem or yanked a couple of weeds–sometimes that’s all I had time for. But I never missed a day, and all my life, I’d been waiting for permission to do just that. I wanted gardening to be more important than the news of the world, say, or making a living, and now it was.
Meanwhile, the garden and I began to get along better. I stopped screaming at it and it stopped acting out. A garden can thrive while looking ratty, I discovered, and if I wasn’t a great caretaker, I was good enough. Funny how that described, exactly, the way I mother my kids.
It was a revelation. It made me want to visit Patty Leander on her own turf, especially if she might throw more free vegetables, and advice, my way. Sure enough, she did.
“We’re entering the inferno,” she said, by way of a greeting. “My beans have about had it. That’s why we say to plant as soon as you can in the spring-you’ll have a chance of getting a crop before the heat sets in.”
The beans looked fine to me, but then, my definition of “fine” had recently changed to allow the presence of leaf-footed bugs and spider mites. Even more scenic were the artichokes, tomatoes, cucumbers, winter squash, eggplant, melons and southern peas-in short, the sweeping truck-farm-like gardens Patty built from scratch behind her late-model suburban home. Most of her plants were carefully labeled, and she kept the kind of detailed notes Master Gardeners rely on when it comes time to recommend a particular seed.
A life-long gardener, she had spent years learning from a couple in their eighties, now deceased, whose garden was informed by the Depression and the Victory Gardens of the 1940s.
“George and Mary knew so much,” she remembered. “They inspired me with their garden, their passion, their stories. They grew so much and gave so much away. There are so many days I wish I could come out and talk to Mary.”
Apparently, sometimes even an expert needs advice-and we amateurs positively yearn for it. By following Patty around her yard and taking notes, I got enough to last me long past the summer of 2008. But the best tip was the simplest: go into your garden every day and spend a few minutes looking around.
“It’s exercise, it’s a hobby, it’s food,” Patty said, and I can’t think of a better excuse.
A few more ideas from Patty Leander
- You can’t have too many leaves. Rather than move them in and out of the compost bin, dump them into free-form piles and harvest the rich black “good stuff” at the bottom. Use leaves to mulch paths between vegetable beds, and till their decomposed remains into the plots at season’s end. Spread leaves on top of paper leaf bags to block weeds. Some people bag their leaves and leave them curbside. This means more for you, so feel free to scavenge in the fall.
- Plant as early as you can, and realize that our two growing seasons are short. When a plant stops producing, pull it out ruthlessly and move on.
- On the other hand, a less-productive plant can be turned into a trap crop to distract bad bugs and delay them from going where you’d rather they didn’t.
- Don’t kill bugs indiscriminately. Can’t tell the beneficials from the destroyers? “If there’s one,” Patty says, “it’s probably a good guy. If there’s a hundred, it’s a bad guy.”
- Write plant labels in pencil. Unlike Sharpies, laundry pens and felt markers, pencils don’t fade or blur in the rain. Next year, erase and start over.
- Be a realist. Stink bugs swarm in July, and some things can’t be made to grow in Central Texas. “Everything wilts in the afternoon,” Patty says, “that’s just what it does.” That being the case, wait till morning. Just about everything looks better then.
